And as you have probably guessed, this is another service announcement. Readers of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine might have noticed that the November 2014 issue (on sale now in September) features a story by Norizuki Rintarō in the Passport to Crime section. The Lure of the Green Door is a wonderful and fairly humorous locked room murder mystery featuring Norizuki Rintarō, a writer / amateur detective, who happens to be dragged into the case as he was researching a new book / trying to hit on the librarian. As many of the best locked room short stories, the solution is surprisingly simple, but elegant and The Lure of the Green Door is a very well regarded bibliophilic impossible crime story in Japan.

And I had the pleasure of being the story's translator. Some might remember that I had posted an older version of the translation here many, many moons ago. But after an extensive overhaul of the text by me and the force that is John Pugmire of Locked Room International (who came up with the idea of submitting the story to EQMM and also adapted the story), we finally got The Lure of the Green Door published. It's not the first story by Norizuki Rintarō available in an English translation, but hopefully, it won't be the last either.

And yes, schemes are designed and plans are made for future releases. But that's a tale for another day.

Thanks, but I was already aware of that for quite some time now. They're short stories by the way, not novels. Fun stuff too.

I usually don't report on news of upcoming translations etc. on this blog because I want to focus on 'just' the stories themselves (unless I'm involved with a publication, like with "The Lure of the Green Door"), but I do usually keep an eye on these things. Also, it would be kinda unnecessary for me to do so, because Dokuta over at the Asia Mystery League keeps up a very detailed list of recently published translations, and announced/upcoming translations of Japanese mystery novels and while the site is in Japanese, the list and links on the halfway point of the page should speak for itself.

It's talking about (uncertain) future releases of Japanese mystery novels in English (so I can't say anything about whether they're really coming or not).

Somewhere 2015: Shimada Soji's "The Crime at the Slanted Mansion" and "Jack the Ripper - Hundred Years of Solitude" by LRI 201X: Kirino Natsuo's "IN" (which appears on Amazon, but without a proper release date)

I'm afraid it won't be easy. It's been out for a year now and I don't think that many "regular" shops keep their physical stock of older EQMMs. I think you'll have to look for specialist stores or second-hand stores.